Francesco Arena

Autumn lines

February 11 – April 30, 2016

Sprovieri is delighted to present ‘Autumn Lines’ the inaugural exhibition with the gallery by Italian artist Francesco Arena.Numbers that take on form. If one were to compress a large part of Francesco Arena's work into a simple, direct formula, this could certainly be it. From a linguistic point of view his work can be read as a development, a personal “derivation” of sculptural processes that arise from the geometric shapes of Minimal art and from the more archetypal ones of Arte Povera, from a thematic point of view his pieces are often the translation of formulae and numbers linked to those facts or histories from which they originate. The artist's research often moves along two tracks – that of collective history, chiefly national, and that of personal history – forming two lines that touch, overlap, cross. In his performances, installations and sculptures, the narrative “in-forms” the objects, be they everyday objects or composed of traditional sculptural materials.Autumn Lines presents a series of works conceived at the end of autumn 2015. A few months ago, in fact, the world began to witness a collective tragedy which is still taking place and is destined to change the fate of present and future history: the mass migration towards Europe by hundreds of thousands of refugees from war-torn Syria and the Middle East. The four pieces making up the project, albeit autonomous, are clearly connected not only by the human events informing them and representing the starting point, but also by their formalisation, the transformation of a numeric figure into a line, to which the title of the entire project alludes.